CmdrTaco writes: "It's total navalgazing and I wouldn't post it if I was still working here, but I thought my heirs would be pleased to know that Slashdot got a mention in Neal Stephenson's Reamde. Be proud and keep up the fight. It's page 161 if you have the hardcover."Link to Original Source

JohnBert writes: "A German privacy protection authority is calling on organizations there to close their Facebook fan pages and remove the social networking site's "Like" button from their websites, arguing that Facebook harvests data in violation of German and European Union law.

The Independent Centre for Privacy Protection (ULD), the privacy protection agency for the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, issued a news release on Friday saying Facebook builds a broad, individualized profile for people who view Facebook content on third-party websites.

Data is sent back to Facebook's servers in the U.S., which the agency alleges violates the German Telemedia Act, the German Federal Data Protection Act and the Data Protection Act of Schleswig-Holstein. The agency alleges the data is held by Facebook for two years, and wants website owners in the state to remove links to Facebook by the end of next month or possibly face a fine."Link to Original Source

MrSeb writes: "Ahh, the Windows Explorer progress dialog. For years it has been struggling to figure out how to calculate how long our copy and delete operations would take, sliding the progress bar back and forth in a seemingly random, haphazard way, the laws of time all but ceasing to exist — five seconds remaining one moment and 13 minutes the next. That’s (almost) all going to change, with the arrival of a greatly improved file management experience in Windows 8. Copy, move, delete, rename, and conflict resolution are all being overhauled for Windows 8 — and it's about time!"Link to Original Source

Also known as MBR (master boot record) threats, the malware infect an area of the hard disk that makes them one of the first things to be read and executed when a computer is turned on. This enables the threats to effectively dodge many security defenses.

In June, Microsoft warned Windows users about a bootkit Trojan known as Popureb, touching off discussions about whether or not infected users were better off completely re-installing Windows.

Infecting the MBR is not a new technique per se; many of the old boot sector viruses from over a decade ago did something similar, the report notes. The difference is modern MBR malware do so much more than just infecting the MBR. It certainly looks as if MBR malware is making a comeback in 2011.Link to Original Source

An anonymous reader writes: Yesterday's earthquake in Virginia brought back some clear memories from 9-11 when I was unable to call my wife to check on her from either of my cellular or my landline phones. With all of the money spent on emergency communications infrastructure post 9-11, I was very disappointed and I'm left thoroughly disturbed about the potential of not being able to call 911 or reach my loved ones in the event of an actual emergency. So I'm left with two questions — 1) when are the cellular providers going to step up and provide more reliable networks, and 2) what is a reliable, affordable means of contacting emergency services that doesn't involve a landline or cellular telephone?

parallel_prankster writes: New studies by researchers at the University at Buffalo have found that when a woman's goal is to be romantically desirable, she distances herself from academic majors and activities related to science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). The studies, funded in part by the National Science Foundation, were undertaken to determine why women, who have made tremendous progress in education and the workplace over the past few decades, continue to be underrepresented at the highest levels of STEM. Lead author Lora E. Park, PhD, UB associate professor of psychology and her co-authors, found converging support for the idea that when romantic goals are activated, either by environmental cues or personal choice, women — but not men — show less interest in STEM and more interest in feminine fields, such as the arts, languages and English. Alternative link is here

dkd903 writes: "Sean Ryan, Director of Games partnership at Facebook says "Google has emulated aspects of our system, which is what they have the right to do. We just need to be better. Google is at 5% because they don't have any users.""Link to Original Source

An anonymous reader writes: Security researchers have unearthed a piece of malware that mints a digital currency known as Bitcoins by harnessing the immense power of an infected machine's graphical processing units.

According to new research from antivirus provider Symantec, Trojan.Badminer uses GPUs to generate virtual coins through a practice known as minting. That's the term for solving difficult cryptographic proof-of-work problems and being rewarded with 50 Bitcoins for each per correct block.Link to Original Source

Slags writes: The idea behind Fluidinfo is that read-only information is just not as useful as on the Web as openly writable information. Metadata is used routinely in the real world from name tags to post-it notes but it is much harder to apply metadata to information on the Internet. That is where Fluidinfo comes along. When information needs to be stored about an object the Fluidinfo database is queried. If the object exists in Fluidinfo, the information is appended to the object. If the object does not exist then it will be created and stored.

An anonymous reader writes: Bre Pettis is so busy right now he should print a replica of himself. Pettis is a co-founder of the Brooklyn-based consumer 3D printing wunderkind MakerBot. He's also one of the de facto spokesmen for "Maker" culture, whose acolytes design and print objects then post the results online. Pettis dreams of a rapidly prototyped utopia filled with objects custom made by people.He is also an entrepreneur who must deal with the vagaries of supply chains and the demands of his customer base. Txchnologist talked with him last week.Link to Original Source

coondoggie writes: "Denizens of the malware underworld who sell access to compromised computers do so at varying rates depending on where the machines are located, researchers told the Usenix Security Symposium this week. The researchers followed what they called the pay-per-install (PPI) industry, which obtains infected machines from which malware can be launched and sells access to these machines to parties looking for someplace to execute malicious code. Sometimes the PPI sellers hire middlemen to supply the compromised machines, and the PPI dealer retails them."Link to Original Source

zacharye writes: Google and Motorola Mobility have announced an agreement whereby Google will acquire Motorola for $12.5 billion. The acquisition price equates to $40 per share of Motorola stock, or a premium of 63% over Friday’s closing price. The move is considered to be an effort that will better-align Google to compete with Apple’s iPhone, which currently owns two-thirds of profits among the world’s top-8 smartphone vendors...Link to Original Source